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Date: Sat, 23 Feb 2008 20:44:54 +0100
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Subject: Re: [PHP-DEV] Re: Traits for PHP ... Why can't every Class be a Trait?
From: php@stefan-marr.de (Stefan Marr)

Hi,

Steph Fox schrieb:
> All I'm seeing here is people with CS degrees saying trait would be 
> cool. What about us peasants? Or am I the last living peasant? :\  
> That's possible, I suppose.
> 
> Sell it to me?
A very cool thing of traits is the flattening property ensuring that 
there is no difference between a method from a trait imported to the 
class and a method defined in the class.
Ok, there are people trying to mess up the notion proposed by additional 
complexity.
But based on the original proposal made by me, traits can be seen as a 
language supported copy'n'past mechanism, like some complex macro 
copying the traits methods to a class body (with those excluding and 
aliasing features added).

In the implementation for the Squeak Smalltalk language, they have 
introduced a modified class browser. The class browser is the embedded 
IDE of the Smalltalk guys, with similar features as the outline view of 
eclipse.
To avoid the need for developers to struggle with traits if they don't 
know about or do not like them, they build a class browser which only 
shows the flattened view on the classes, including all methods from 
traits but avoiding to annoy the developers with the trait notion.

This is possible to be implemented in the Eclipse PDT, too.
Some Java guys have already demonstrated a comparable implementation for 
the Java part of IDE to demonstrate traits for Java.
In my opinion, traits is a thing developers has only to be aware of if 
they really did like to use them. (iff proper tool support is available. 
Guess it wouldn't be that way for VIM users, for example)

Kind Regards
Stefan